When I first read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I, at first glance, assumed the ‘work’ in the title referred to something like a piece or creation (i.e. great ‘works’ of art) but then realized that he is instead referring to the the actual work that art can do in a new era where art can be rapidly reproduced, circulated, and accessed by the public. The piece argues towards a theory of art that allows for the creation and reproduction of art to work as a sort of revolutionary praxis; Benjamin wants to develop a theory that is useless for the purposes of fascism, but “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (1052).

Benjamin states that the age of mechanical reproduction has changed the way that society looks at and interacts with different forms of art. This is particularly because the ability to mass reproduce the image of paintings for example, has diminished in the painting what he calls the aura, which is found in the “uniqueness and permanence” of the painting (1055). As the image of the painting is reproduced and made available to the masses, the aura of the original painting is diminished and there is no aura to the reproduction; it is able to be engaged with, touched, made available to the public. For example, it’s likely that if you go to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, you have already seen the image of the Mona Lisa reproduced multiple times in your life, on coffee mugs, on calendars, on brochures.

Benjamin particularly recognizes film as a medium which has revolutionary potential because there is no ‘authenticity’ or ‘aura’ to film, its sole purpose is to have an audience participating with it. As opposed to a painting, there isn’t much of a ‘true’ original for film; potential opulence of a premiere aside, whether you see a film at its first ever screening or you see it months later in your local movie theatre, you are going to see the same movie.

I’m interested in film, so I particularly like this essay because of its analysis of cinema as a medium. A favorite movie of mine is Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy which is very obviously influenced and inspired by Benjamin’s essay. One of the main components of the movie is centered around one of the main characters’ book, which is called “certified Copy.” It’s quite clearly a riff of Benjamin, though with some differences, where the character, James, argues that the art history world should not be concerned with issues of ‘authenticity’ vs. ‘forgeries’ or ‘copies’ because every work of art is, at its very basis, a copy of something else. Even the Mona Lisa, he argues, is a copy of the woman who modeled for the painting, or of the image of a woman that Leonardo had in his head while painting it. However, what’s most interesting about the film are the interactions between James and Elle, played by Juliette Binoche, who is an antiques dealer that James meets while promoting his book in Italy. While traveling through Tuscany to sightsee, they are often assumed by strangers to be husband and wife, which, as the movie goes on, also starts to be a problem for the viewer. It becomes increasingly more difficult to discern whether the two are themselves an ‘authentic’ married couple or a ‘copy’ of one. As a film it’s a bit meandering and minimalist if you’re not used to that type of thing, but I think it’s really brilliant and lovely to watch, and interesting to consider in relation to this Benjamin essay.

In his essay “The Fact of Blackness” Fanon combines his personal experiences with his background in psychiatry to examine the “uniform” of blackness (260). He begins his discussion by stating that “not only must the black man be black; he must also be black in relation to the white man” (257). Pointing out this framework of a foil, Fanon explains that whiteness constructs itself in relation to blackness, which must then be constructed as inferior in order to reinforce the idea that whiteness is superior. On page 260, Fanon further writes, “A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man.” In this way, white supremacy cannot function by simply isolating and casting aside the racial ‘other,’ but must construct an identity around them and subordinate them so as to maintain its control.

He further goes on to describe the individual experience of being black in a racist society, where “assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema” (258). Fanon argues that instead of inhabiting, and coming to know, his own body and attempting to look at, make sense, and interact with the world around him through the knowledge of what his own particular body can and cannot do, he is instead known by the world around him, and is forced to know himself, within the framework of race and the attributes that society includes in the construct of blackness. This comes to define how he interacts with the world – no longer through the corporeal, but through the epidermal.

Fanon describes becoming aware of his body not “in the third person but in a triple person” (259). For Fanon, it is not just of question of knowing that an image of you exists in the minds of others as a ‘third person’ as he/she/it, but that but that he is forced to be aware of his own body, aware of the negative identity and set of images that are applied not only to him, but to his ancestors, to everyone who is incorporated into the construct of blackness, and aware of the way others interpret and assign meaning to him when seeing his skin color. And while Fanon notes that there are similarities between how Black people live in a racist society and how white Jewish people live in a racist society (notably that an antisemite is inevitably anti-black), this experience of your identity being determined for you by your outer appearance is where he makes the distinction between anti-black racism and antisemitism. He references Sartre, who states that being Jewish in a racist society is a case of being “overdetermined from the inside,” where you “live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype” (260). Fanon argues, however, that he is “given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.” He writes that “The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down” but that being black means that even when you “progress by crawling,” there is no way out; you are already “being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes” (260-1). While white Jews live with the fear of their actions fulfilling antisemitic stereotypes, being black means being “locked into the infernal circle” (261). All of your actions will be made to fulfill anti-black stereotypes because “the evidence was there, unalterable” (261).

An interesting essay that I enjoyed and was reminded of while reading this Fanon piece talks about how representations and discourses of love, desire, and sexuality are racialized and coded around which bodies are deemed worthy of the ‘work’ of love. It’s worth a read: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love

Judith Butler begins her piece in Gender Trouble by discussing what it means to be, be in, and make ‘trouble.’ Reflecting on her childhood, Butler notes that ‘trouble’ presented itself to her as an inevitable condition since “the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep out of trouble” (2540). She states that the ambiguities around what it meant to cause or be ‘trouble,’ gave her early insight into the subtleties of certain structures of power, particularly because ‘trouble’ was a problem that was typically coded with, or attached to, femininity. Butler notes that for Beauvoir and Sartre, for example, trouble is found, and defined, through the shifting subjectivities of masculine and feminine positions and the power dynamics within this exchange. However, Butler goes further to argue that power is not solely operating in the relationship between masculine and feminine subjects, but within the larger construction of any ‘true’ gender binary (2540).

Butler wants to complicate, or, rather, to destabilize, the distinctions of sex and gender which serve as a point of reference for feminist theory and politics. Whereas some feminist scholars (many of them, it seems, at the time that Butler is writing) would represent the sex/gender distinction as being something that has a point of departure from the body, Butler rejects the idea that there is any kind of ‘true’ body from which those distinctions can emerge: “Any theory of the culturally constructed body…ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse” (2542). She extends this argument by building on and expanding other writers’ understandings of the body, most significantly that of Foucault’s. Though I’m a little less confident with Foucault’s exact argument, through Butler’s explanation I understanding his description of the body as being like a blank page on which things are inscribed; our everyday actions and interactions with different structures of power ‘write’ our identity onto our body. However, Butler tries to expand this, saying that the body is not so clear in its boundaries, it exists in relationship to other things and therefore it must be reinforced through repetitive performances. For Butler, the body isn’t so much a blank page upon which identity is written, but is created through the ‘writing’ itself, and that this is seen significantly through gender. Gender is therefore not an expression of an internal identity, but a performance that, through its action, constitutes an identity.

It’s with this inner/outer identity distinction that Butler situates her discussion of drag. Butler finds drag interesting and subversive because it shows “the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency,” as well as revealing “that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (2550). With drag, the question of whether a queen is someone with a masculine ‘inside’ performing femininity on the ‘outside’ or someone with a ‘true’ feminine ‘inside’ that resides in a ‘masculine body,’ makes it clear that there is no simple or ‘true’ original distinction of gender and sex. Ultimately, what we understand as gender non-conformity or deviation from gender, is more accurately a practice of “gender transformation…that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (2552).

George R. R. Martin’s love for the 80’s word processor is something akin to writers hand writing the first draft of their greatest works. Our generation is so used to words being auto capitalized and having a squiggly red line under misspelled words that it’s almost like the words on the paper are not our own. I’m not surprised by the amount of writers that have stuck with what we consider “old fashioned” writing processors because they want the words to be their own with their flaws and all. Wordstar is not a processor that i’ve had the bitter pleasure to use but if it is anything like early 90’s Microsoft word, I’m glad I didn’t. While I, a person in their 20’s, would rather not have to go through the harsh task of navigating through software that requires more than a few steps, an older generation found solace in it’s outline. the Article describes it at taking the layout of a typewriter while also having every editing tool only have one function so that there is authenticity without the struggle of having to write something long hand. And while anyone can appreciate not having to write something out, most have grown accustomed to having a computer do all the work for you. Take this wordpress website for instance. when typing out a new post, it does not automatically capitalize the first letter of a new sentence and i’m pretty sure the first time I noticed I rolled my eyes and had to go back and manually fix it. this is a product of having a writing system that does it for you and Wordstar did not do that. At the point of its conception and its golden years, no one could even fathom a system that fixed all the small mistakes on its own and they were satisfied with what they had. Of course there are still the writers that prefer to do the fixing themselves but for ordinary people, having to use an older system would be annoying and tedious. Of course there is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche about our writing tools shaping our thoughts and it’s true. We find our styles and our typing patters with the hold of what we are given. We have the possibility to write thousands of words in such a short amount of time and without getting a cramp in our wrists because we have technology to do the hard work for us. It’s important to appreciate and understand the history of this tech and how much it has done for writers and readers alike.

In Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble, Butler focuses on the topics of gender identities between gender and sex. She starts off by introducing the idea of gender as performative, meaning a production of series of effects that combine an impression. Butler feels as though that gender is this phenomenon where us as individuals “perform” gender relatively through what we wear, our posture, our manners, utterances, and etc. The idea of performative gender is socially produced through repetition. Butler strongly believes through that no one is truly born with a gender, but on the other side she believes that once we are born into this world, our gender is already chosen for us through this unexplained destiny.

In this writing, Butler also argues that sex is a social construct and is a category that stems from both social and cultural norms within a setting that reflects history and both social and political aspects. She tests the performative theory of gender through the analysis of drag queens to prove that the idea of gender identity is not a display of something that is supposed to come naturally. Instead she suggests it is a product of actions and behavior that counts as performative. She also makes it a point to say that gestures, apparel, behaviors, utterances, and certain stereotypes all work together as a collective to produce this preconceived notion of masculine and feminine identity. Butler feels as though that this is a problem because it gives people the permission to traffic another person’s gender identity, gender, validate their experiences, and their sexual orientation.

Butler uses both the culture and the lifestyle of drag queens  as an example to continue to prove his point of a performative gender. She uses a documentary called, “Paris is Burning,” which is a 1990 documentary of both drag and queer culture, which is a large part of the drag culture. In drag, there are certain categories that the have to compete in, one being “realness.” In this category, drag contestants would dress as a woman, which Judith says is a way of performing gender. The goal here is to be accepted into both the socially acceptable women or men. They are allowed to perform class, race, and gender within drag races to make them feel more accepted in the world even though institutionally they are ignored. She mentions many examples of drag queens such as Trixie Mattel and Katya who are in Paris is Burning and how they display femininity which in all proves Judith’s theory that there is no particular way to be feminine or a woman.

Friedrich Kittler focuses on the ways new media technologies have evolved and in turn how people now view it, in this excerpt from ‘Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’. He states, ‘What reached the page of the surprised author between 1880 and 1920 by means of the gramophone, film and typewriter – the very first mechanical media – amounts to a spectral photograph of our present as future. That is to say, with those early and seemingly harmless devices that could store and thereby separate as such, sounds, faces and documents, a mechanization of information began, which – in the hindsight of stories – already made today’s self-recursive number stream possible’ (Kittler). Kittler’s focus is explaining to the reader how the advancement in technology has made its accessibility easier to use in day-to-day life. We can make a smooth transition from one thing to another with just the touch of a button because of how evolved and advanced the media has become. We are able to move from the music industry onto the film industry with just the touch of one button, hinting at the fact that we have lost sight of the original definition of media.

This passage develops the relationship between the addresser and addressee, between the media and the messenger. There were interpertations of what literature is and does. This was enabled by the risk of cultural machines. Mechanical media during the 1900s had and aura of scarcity and discontinuity. An example that Kittler gives is the written book. It was a cultural belief that if it was not written about in a book than it did not happen. The aura of mechanical media is the idea that there is an original copy somewhere, making that very scarce. This can be related to today’s culture when most people say ‘pictures or it did not happen’. This just further proves the point that as long as the media is advancing and evolving, so are its people. Digital media is a part of the twenty-first century. Because digital media is so ubiquitous the aura is a contrast to that of mechanical media. Since it can be seen anywhere, usually at the touch of a finger the aura of the original content is stripped. This advancement in media allows for different interpretations of the original message.

In “Track Changes” by Mattew Kirschenbaum The story of writing in the digital age can be as messy as the rags that that are on the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot lead of a very high tech machine. During the period of strong growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors used it as a marvel while others used it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing talked about as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing? “Track Changes” balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the ineffable act of writing is always grounded in certain instruments and media, like quills to keyboards. Along the way, we begin to see the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, and they also explore the surprising changed reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud. Writing for a certain audience of fellow scholars who can reasonably be assumed to know it already, Kirschenbaum  uses much of the social, literary, and technological context that would have made “Track Changes” more broadly easy to get.  He really assumes, for example, that the reader needs only the smallest reminder of why the Appleor the Altair 8800 was a powerful moment in the history of personal computers. He also talks about all but extinct devices like impact printers, floppy disks, teletype machines, and the IBM Selectric typewriter like they are still familiar,  even though the fact that a strong and growing section of readers has never seen “Ñlet” or even used “Ñthem” in their natural habitat. Track Changes is a useful placeholder for a soon to be written technological history of word processing and a useful resource for those deeply into in it so much.

Wholes and Parts

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Men, Women and Masculinity by Jack Halberstam dives into a topic that for much time has been deemed to uncomfortable to talk about and that is female masculinity and lesbianism. Halberstam unravels the notion of masculinity being associated with males but instead how masculinity can exist and manifest itself in women and the female body. Halberstam also makes female masculinity come across as something that isn’t whole, I think it would stem off of what masculinity had been socially constructed upon. Thus making male masculinity ‘whole’ and female masculinity as ‘half’ or ‘part of’ – which explains ones totality.

The fright of lesbianism in this sense stems off from this masculine order and disorder. The intimidation stemming from a lesbian ‘femme’ stems from the thought of a perfect ideal lesbian who is not attracted to men, Though there is an intimidation of both the male and ‘Butch’ lesbians because it strips from one’s own masculinity and the male that is usually associated with masculinity, no longer is the bearer of masculinity in a concept of whole. Halberstam uses examples such as the “silly archive” in order to split masculinity from it’s socially constructed concept. Female masculinity in a way reclaims the very definition of masculinity thus making it open to all genders instead of being gender exclusive.

Female masculinity, as I mentioned is seen as half or part of, what this really means is that female masculinity is deemed as more weak, vulnerable which contrasts from what ‘masculinity’ is ‘supposed to be’ – strong and powerful. Though I would say, when the construction of masculinity is broken, women who are deemed “butch” would be considered a radical change in the masculine narrative. Halberstam states in page 265, in relation to the femme and butch, “the attractive lesbian who rejects them and the butch that rivals their masculinities”, the quote examines why heteronormative ‘masculine’ males feel intimidated of female masculinity – or butch lesbians and femme lesbians. Halberstam also states why men always put down women when examining the ‘female image’, anything that is deemed to manly, such as, body hair, actions, that may challenge the male image is deemed as a huge, no. This could be due to the hierarchical ways men and women are placed. In this case, men are always at the top.

Towards the end, Halberstam examines the story of a gay man being addressed by a stranger and misidentified him. The demonstration of the stranger addressing the gay man and misidentified him was in way for him to create his own wholeness/totality, to not only assert his dominance but his masculinity. The misidentified man is left in shock and is puzzled. As he has been misidentified and one who probably viewed himself as whole is now only half due to the misidentification which relates back to female masculinity.

An Act in itself

Gender trouble by Judith Butler, argues that our bodies aren’t are identities but that Gender, including in which we identify with is all a performative act. The body is examined at birth, is the sex of the baby male or female? Will we deem it a girl or boy after these examinations? The body, sex and gender go through a dysmorphia of sorts. It is continually changed, looked down upon, altered, attacked, insulted, it is a cluster of things. To the extent that if born in a particular body, the society may treat you differently, such as females, or those who identify as girls. We are made of two parts, Judith says, the outer and the inner, and the inner is an outer force that forces itself upon us. She even goes to the extent to use the soul as an example, it is thought that the soul imprisons the body but to the contrary, she believes that the body imprisons the soul. The inner self is made up of social constructs, and weirdly, these social constructs are nonverbally agreed too, like a unspoken law or rule. Sexuality, is taught from our first few steps- the way we talk, how we talk, how we dress and who we are supposed to like, despise and love. Judith uses the example of the souls imprisonment  to support her idea that gender and sexuality are socially constructed and is something that is learned in everyday society from infancy up until our adulthood.

Judith also uses drag shows as an example of how gender and sexuality is a performative act. Drag shows, which involve men who dress up and perform a gender separate from their sex – this is to both drag queens and drag kings. In this sense, Judith uses drag queens – who are a hyper representation of femininity as a way of looking at how gender and sexuality is performed in society. Through this example Judith makes it known that society and not biology, define what we all know to be gender. To the contrary of what some may say, that gender may be a sense of expression rather than a confined space – that very confined space may imprison someone or already has- the thought of being either or is already ingrained within us, I think it’s hard to imagine what it is to not be feminine or masculine, because that in itself becomes another category- another way to label one’s self – “if the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false…” (2549)

In the book, Track Changes, by Matthew Kirshenbaum looks into the writing process of writers and how different type of writing can affect a writer’s work. He also examines how with technological advances, writers have to adapt to these changes and how technology also adapts to writer’s preferences. In the beginning of the book, Kirshenbaum writes about George R. R. Martin’s interview which the audiences find out he uses a program called WordStar because it is not as distracting as other writing programs. Everyone was waiting for this part because it is part of his writing process which created books that many people liked. Many people would want to know how to achieve greatness and George R. R. Martin’s way of writing, but every writer’s writing process is different. “Many reader will recognize modes from their own experience: When you switch back and forth between different “screens” or interfaces within the same application to accomplish different kinds of tasks, you are working within different modes.”(Kirshenbaum, 4). A person might be used to an user interface or prefers it more because of the tools he/she uses is much more convenient to use than another program. Over time they will become masters of the program and know the tricks and shortcuts to make whatever they are doing faster. Kirshenbaum writes about this with two different writers. George R. R. Martin mastered WordStar and became second nature to him while another writer, Dennis Baron, tried to grasp WordStar, but simply couldn’t because the interface doesn’t suit him.(Kirshenbaum, 2).

With advancement in technology, changes will have to be made. Word processors like WordStar doesn’t change how you write, but newer word processors like googleDocs, they will make changes for you and sometimes a writer doesn’t want that. A poet may be using white spaces to create a more dynamic poem that uses lines to draw a picture or a poet is trying to use capitalization of a word to emphasis its significance. Word processors don’t understand this because they don’t understand what the writer wants. They follow rules that are set by them and carry it out to the best of their abilities and also follow commands inputted by users. But there are writers who embraces these changes and prefers it that way. Writing preference and the tools they used shapes how they think and as Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Our writing tools shape our thoughts…”(Kirshenbaum, 10). However writers don’t have to embrace new technologies completely or to only use older technologies. They can compromise and adapt to new technologies. Lucille Clifton would think out her writing piece in her head and then put it on a word processor.(Kirshenbaum, 11). There is also Brathwaite who uses fonts to create writing pieces because it provides an aesthetic quality to it.(Kirshenbaum, 202).

In The Mirror Stage, Lacan proposes that the “mirror stage” is a psychological development  in which an infant recognizes himself or herself in the mirror and become aware of selfhood. Lacan observes that this stage occurs sometime before the infant is 18 months old, and this is the moment when the infant realizes that he or she is a separate entity from other people and things. This begins the process of constructing an identity that is different from others, yet at the same time, it is dependent on the images of others to establish itself.

Lacan built his concept on a number of Freudian theories and developed them further in order to explore human behavior and identity. According to Freud, the id is a natural part of our personality that is unconsciously driven by basic human desires. The ego on the other hand, is a factor of our personality that develops to engage with reality in a way that our basic needs are met but in ways that reflect our social realities and restrictions. For Lacan, the mirror stage is the point at which the ego develops as a way of containing and constraining the limitless desires of the id. In this stage, a child has the ability to separate the “I” from the “other”; the child can now finally recognize a sense of boundary lines between the self and other outside identities. At this stage the child recognizes for the first time that he or she is actually an individual and not just a body that is dependent on others for everything. Lacan also built on Freud’s ideas about sexuality and unconscious desire. Freud claimed that dreams reveal the truth about the individual’s unconscious desires. These desires are always a reflection of the desires that others have. Lacan goes on to argue that desire is always dependent on others. When it comes to sexual desires, Freud underlined the importance of sexuality and sexual behavior as a guide for unconscious desires. Lacan continued to observe sexuality to suggest that people are always learning what to desire. For example, advertisements bring up the idea that desire is actually constructed outside of the individual, rather than just naturally developing from inside of them. Advertisers can convince people to desire a particular kind of car, phone, designer wear, or type of food/drink.

Another major theory that Lacan includes in his work is Freud’s Oedipal complex. Freud’s Oedipus is a complex theory that describes one of the psychosexual stages of a child called the “phallic stage,” and this occurs usually between the ages of 3 and 5. According to Freud, the child develops a sense of resentment towards the father and a want to replace him because of a desire for his mother. Lacan visualizes that the child develops an obsession with trying to figure out what the mother wants and tries to fulfill them. However, the child eventually comes to realizes that the influence of the “Law” represented by the father figure actually impacts that maternal desire, and the child identifies himself with a larger cultural aspect, rather than be limited to the world of the mother’s desires.